North

Does the North of that storied isle begin at Cambridge? It is an interesting place, the isle of Ely where the monks hid from authority and built themselves a legendary centre of learning. Of course, that's not all true.

Yet I can't help but think, as my mind roams northward out of Londinium from the fastnesses of the old Arsenal, that there must be some point at which North must begin. North is not necessarily 'north of the border' — it is an idea, an idea of wilderness and wildness.

That's probably why the dreaming spires were never thought of as wild in that particular sense — the denizens of those halls were part of civilisation and not beyond the pale.

The Neglected Ocean

Someone just pointed out to me that Perth, Western Australia, is an Indian Ocean seaport. Heck, so is Adelaide, capital of South Australia. In fact the Indian Ocean stretches from 20°E to 146°55'E, which makes its westernmost port probably Port Elizabeth in South Africa.

Most of human trade and civilisation over the span of our history has traversed this neglected ocean. Egypt's only ocean access is to the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian peninsula is almost entirely surrounded by it. Few know how large the Chinese presence here used to be, still is, and continues to be. There perhaps more than 50,000 Chinese (mostly Cantonese) on Madagascar, and another 35,000 on Mauritius. Singapore is an Indian Ocean city.

This is why geography is both romantic and important. These are the huge stories hidden in plain sight. Or plain sites.

The Mechanical West

The West has always been seen as the seat of materialism, and in that sense, one might argue that spiritual ideas flow more from the East to the West, while material ideas flow more from the West to the East. But this requires examples, and leads to an interesting idea which itself requires explanation, historical or otherwise.

To begin with, I suspect the idea of 'East and West' applies only to the Eurasian supercontinent, and that the further you get away from this latitudinal zone, the less it applies. You could call North America part of this zone, and call it 'West' by colonial extension, and formerly 'East'. Africa, South America — both of these are hard to classify, although both have been tainted a lot by the West. The Indian subcontinent is a problem; it's obviously part of the origin of the West, and yet unalterably East.

The material ideas I'm thinking of, however, are the big modern ideas like democracy, capitalism, Marxism, and suchlike. All these are atheistic ideas spawned in the West and translated to the East. They are atheist religions, having no god and dealing with only the life that is. They create material benchmarks and judge the whole world by these. Medicine from the West, tested and tried by experiment and physical action, is 'medicine' — any Eastern treatment is 'alternative medicine'. Any alternative to American democracy is seen as 'alternative democracy' or something less than ideal.

The East has had to adopt Western practices in every technological and scientific area, in order to be taken seriously. The Japanese learnt this early, and are now the most Western of the East. Cyril Aydon, in A Brief History of Mankind, claims that the Industrial Revolution didn't come to China because it was not a civilisation that was mechanically-minded at the individual level, and that the peasantry did not have the leisure that the large Western middle class had to think about such things. I think he's right.

Perhaps the thing about the West is that it claims to believe in individuals and then uses machine structures, machine ideas, and machines to regulate their behaviour; the East believes in the collective, and in that sense is less hypocritical. As for India, it believes that everything is equally (un)real, and acts as if that is truth. It is all a wonderful world.

Name Value

Today I was at a classic New York deli; you know, the sort with sandwiches about the size of a large brick, with pickles and cheese and maybe anything else you want in it? It was a good feeling. At the end of it, I saw that the 'New York, New York' logo had been trademarked. It made me think about something else.

Think about the great cities of the world. Ten are on the 'alpha' list; of which four are rated as higher alpha – London, New York, Paris, Tokyo. Why is the branding of these cities so dominant?

It's because they are old, mythic, full of ancient cultural resonances. They have a BRAND, not just a brand. Their names evoke longings, feelings, images, ideas, concepts, legendary dramas. A New York cheesecake, a London cab, a Parisian evening, a Tokyo shopping spree, these can be imagined even if you never go there. The value in their names is something that has seeped into the foundations of the modern world. It has economic value; it has cultural value.

The remaining six cities – Chicago, Frankfurt, Hongkong, Los Angeles, Milan, Singapore – they have drastically less resonance for many people. Hongkong perhaps looks exotic; Singapore perhaps gives wildly diverse impressions; Milan is cars, leather, glass; Los Angeles and Chicago remind people of crime and politics; Frankfurt is... oh no, not hot dogs! They are less iconic, less mythic, less legendary.

It is sad; Hongkong, Milan and Singapore have had history as city-states – now, only the last remains so. The first has to reinvent itself a little; the second has failed; the third is in the throes of mad re-invention to the extent of casinoes and waterside resorts and Formula One (like Monaco, all these things). And with the re-invention, it remains to be seen how much value is created, retained, distorted or lost.

But I will still read the New York Times and the Times of London. I will still have dreams of Paris and Tokyo. And I earnestly await the rise of the 'beta' world cities into a brave new world.

Civilisation

Sometimes it is both interesting and useful to see the history of the world as a collection of arbitrary periods defined by the retrospective highlights. Lots of people do that, and to this chronological spectrography, they add the dimension of space. This means that you can say 'Early Bronze Age' and have it mean a different time period depending on where the artifacts have been found.

Of course, civilisation isn't really like that. Even this concession to the factual solidity embodied by an artifact does not allow us to adequately capture the movement of memes – symbols, ideas, concepts – and the people who carry them, the memephors (if you like). The problem does not go away as we come closer to our present age in time, simply because events have a larger footprint and the implications of each event (and the significance of such events) multiply beyond our horizon of understanding.

In the past, the ocean of history was large and relatively empty. A person invents a tool in what is modern Spain and there is a very long while before it has any impact in what is now Canada. In the present, this is not so. Canada and Spain are no distance away at all, in terms of the Information Age.

If you play games like Sid Meier's Civilisation (currently in its fourth edition), you will see this replicated to some extent. Until you encounter another civilisation, there is absolutely no mutual impact from technological or social innovation on your part or on someone else's part. However, as civilisations begin to encounter each other, exchanges of information and technology occur and the world is wrenched asunder for some, improved for others. Nobody benefits from insularity or from trying to maintain superiority alone.

There is one exception: a power that grows exponentially by conquest without pausing to consolidate can possibly win by eliminating all significant rivals within the sphere of consideration. Even for this exception, the effects of human social behaviour will sooner or later act to brake expansion and cause revolution. The resulting centripetal force and its consequents will cause civilisations that expand too rapidly to fracture, decline in quality, or disastrously contract.

And all this you get by playing computer games for hours. How come? Because good computer game designers learn from history and try to model things so that they happen as they always have (in general) with a bit of random and unexpected stuff (as in real life). The problem is trying to guess the right proportion.

My guess is that there is no right proportion. Nothing is new under the sun; what most people won't guess, somebody has already guessed. The correct guesses are always in the minority, and often made for the wrong reasons when you look at the specifics. The wrong answers are always the majority, and they are often bolstered by retroactive creativity and plain self-deception, so that they look somewhat right.

Eventually, most of us will shake our heads, wave our hands, give a wry smile, scribble something down and call it a day. This is the foundation of history.